#whirlyhopper

"Hey, Ratchet! You know how to fix voices, right? Like, help mechs speak again?"

Oh, he seems to think he can out-meme me.

          There is a quiet tapping at the door to Whirl’s berthroom. There is nothing stopping Soundwave from simply phasing through the door. He only assumes this mech will be more welcoming should he respect their space. From the places between shadows he has watched the friendship between the rotary and race car bloom. It was good for KnockOut. He’d have tipped off the red mech if he wasn’t busy falling apart himself. Soundwave needed Whirl to be okay so that there was somebody to take care of KnockOut.

"you almost - . . .” her normal clipped tones and the deep timbres of her voice wavered and tapered off. with confusion and fear. whirl almost died. and she didn’t know. what’s worse, is that whirl didn’t tell her. 

if whirl had died, perceptor would not have been there. 

perceptor wasn’t there to help them. 

she failed whirl. 

@whirlyhopper

"What is this thing, anyway.”

Just so happened Mimi was visiting home when the Octarian scientific deep-sea research team was all abuzz over some thing they’d dredged up from the floor of the deep ocean. She’d come to deliver weapons blueprints in person, since the head of R&D had gotten all paranoid out of nowhere and decided that sending them over their supposedly-secure wireless network was just not going to do. Fine, whatever. Any excuse to visit Octo Valley and get away from the squids was a good one. 

A surface agent like her normally had no reason to be involved in this, but she’d gotten curious and asked to see what they were all worked up about. Looked like a hunk of junk to her, so encrusted with coral and barnacles and calcareous worm tubes that it was barely identifiable as a vehicle. The research team had been hard at work scraping it clean for days, but it was still a mess. 

“We think it’s a... a helicopter, buried sometime shortly after the human extinction event,” her bi-tentacled host tells her. Several techs walk by, trailed by a train of thick power and data cables. “But it’s remarkably well-preserved.”

“Is it.” Mimi watches, arms crossed skeptically, as the techs pry open a panel on its siding, looking for places to fit the cables. 

“Yes. We think if we could get it powered up, it might even function again.”

“What are the data cables for?”

“We’ll be connecting it to our servers, to see if we can gather any information about the event that wiped out the humans. Perhaps it could be useful, somehow...”

She found that doubtful, but hey, wasn’t her place to tell these guys how to do their job. Mimi strolls up to the nose of the vehicle, using her claws to scratch off some of the caked-on detritus. It’s a bright blue color underneath, far bolder than she expected for something that had been sitting under the sea for thousands of years. 

“That’s the spirit! Maybe there’ll be some cuties there for you to get all starry-optic’d over. Heh.”